White Bird in a Blizzard

by Laura Kasischke

  By the end of the evening, they were sloshed, throwing their arms around each other on the couch, flushed, snorting with laughter. The hostess stayed sober, but led the guests in a few songs. “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” “Old Man River,” and a round of “Row Row Row Your Boat.” Then, they took out their checkbooks and bought Tupperware, carrying it out into the snow to their cars, stumbling and giggling.

  My mother came home from that Tupperware party—the only one she was ever invited to, as far as I know—happier than she had ever been.

  “You’re drunk!” my father said, and my mother put a white plastic bowl on her head. She danced barefoot on the living room carpet for him.

  He seemed pleased, too.

  He liked the plastic items she’d picked out, and didn’t ask how much they cost.

  Then, my mother wore the plastic bowl on her head upstairs, and came into my bedroom.

  I might have been three or four years old, dreaming in an airtight container of sleep. What could I have dreamed back then—milk, snow, sugar? What could I have known?

  She knelt at the side of my bed, kissed my cheek, and I woke, rubbed my eyes, looked up at her dreamily.

  The hall light shone in my eyes.

  There was a halo in her hair.

  It must have been that Tupperware bowl on her head.

  THE DAY BEFORE MY MOTHER VANISHED, HER CANARY DIED.

  “You have to take it back to the pet shop,” I’d said that night. We could hear its stifled weeping from the basement all the way upstairs. “Something’s wrong with that bird.”

  But my mother just stood in the doorway of the bathroom, a toothbrush poised near her mouth, wearing a silvery nightgown, and looked at me.

  She said, “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t?”

  “They offered me a guarantee, and I didn’t take it. They said they’d have to mark the bird if I might want to bring it back. I didn’t want them to mark the bird.”

  Her hair was pulled up. I could see creases around her eyes like that canary’s feet, as if it had left its footprints behind on her face. She seemed more nervous than usual, and started to brush her teeth hard, running water, foaming at the mouth. From the bedroom, I could hear my father fart—loud, abandoned, like a man with nothing to lose. When she heard that, my mother threw her toothbrush down, put a hand on each side of the sink, and shook her head. “Jesus H. Christ,” she said, leaning into it, as if something were finally about to snap.

  The next morning I got out the canary care book my mother had bought with the bird, but never read. It was full of startling facts—

  I didn’t know, for instance, that canaries have no teeth. That the gizzard of a canary is full of gravel, which, instead of teeth, grinds the seed it eats.

  Reading that, I tried to imagine my guts full of gravel—the terrible sound of my own gizzard grinding every night in the dark while I tried to sleep. Perhaps I’d tuck my head under my wing, too, not to hear it. Or maybe I’d sing, horribly, louder and louder every day. Maybe I’d look down at my own gray shit like a splattered skirt around me, and want to fly away.

  Then I read the part that explained how disreputable bird dealers will try to sell you a female canary instead of a male. The female never sings, the book said. She’ll tuck her head under her wing all day. Be sure to get a guarantee. A bird who does not sing, who keeps her head tucked under her wing all day, is not a well-bred bird and will only bring you grief.

  Of course, my mother’s bird sang, but its song was grief.

  The next afternoon, when I went to the basement to feed it, the bird was dead at the bottom of her cage, wings wrapped around the silky change purse of her body, facedown—a terrible cherub, or a diseased angel’s handkerchief fallen out of heaven, full of coughed-up blood and phlegm. Something an angel had sobbed into for weeks.

  My mother put it carefully in a shoe box and threw it into the trash.

  “It wasn’t a male,” I said when she came back from the garage without the box. “They ripped you off.”

  My mother had a look on her face I didn’t recognize, and she fixed me with it.

  The next day, she was gone.

  THE DETECTIVE’S CONDOMINIUM IS ONLY TEN MILES FROM his office. Freedom Crest is the name of the complex it belongs to, a coil of apartments and condominiums with a small black pond in the middle—the heart of freedom, unbeating, iced over, and deep.

  Detective Scieziesciez opens his garage from far away with the automatic opener on his sun visor. “That’s my unit,” he says, pointing to the one with cedar shingles and no lights on, except in the garage, the door rising to expose it.

  It’s the home of a bachelor. Leather sofa, coffee cup in the sink, the smell of carpet and charcoal. There’s a wallet-size photo of a little girl magneted to the refrigerator, and a crude painting of an orchid with “To Daddy” scrawled in pencil under it. The little girl is a tiny, feminine version of Detective Scieziesciez. Dark hair. Sharp features. Her expression seems canny for a child.

  “I’d offer you a beer, sweetheart, but I guess you’re not of age.”

  He’s taken his coat off and hung it in the closet, and now he’s draping his tie across the back of a chair at the kitchen table. Just as I imagined, he’s wearing a shoulder holster, which he slips down his arm. Out of it, he takes a stubby gun. It looks heavy, professional, and the deep blue steel of the barrel is dazzling. I feel a little queasy, thrilled, light-headed seeing it in his hand. The only thing like it I’ve ever seen is the hunting rifle my father keeps locked up in the basement, and this is nothing like that, nothing like that at all. This is something a man hides next to his ribs, something he’d use to kill a person, not a jackrabbit, with.

  Detective Scieziesciez empties bullets into his hands, and they’re thick and gold. A handful of very big and dangerous bees.

  “I’d take one anyway,” I say.

  He smiles out of one corner of his mouth, and says, “That’s my girl,” complimenting my spunkiness as if it’s a quality he’s grown familiar with, although we have met only once, for perhaps five minutes, before today. He opens the refrigerator and takes out two bottles of Heineken and flips the caps off them with an opener, hands me mine.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, you still have your coat on. Let me take it for you.” The detective comes around behind me and slips my coat down my shoulders.

  I feel his hand graze my upper arm. The hand with the Band-Aid.

  “Have a seat.” He motions me toward the leather sofa. For a moment I worry that he’ll put a record on the stereo—some kind of throaty jazz—and that I’ll be embarrassed by it, by the television drama of it, but he doesn’t. He sits down in an armchair across from the sofa, and leans back in it.

  We don’t say anything.

  I look around his living room, which has only a few framed prints on the wall. Something with big red stripes in the middle, a black-and-white photograph of a mountain shrouded in clouds, and an orange and two apples on a cutting board with a wood-handled paring knife. There’s a magazine called The Ohio Sportsman on his coffee table. The sportsman on the cover is posing beside a buck with dead eyes. Both of them are grinning at the camera. There’s a bit of steam coming out of the sportsman’s mouth, and snow on a hillside behind them.

  “You seem nervous,” the detective says.

  I cross my legs and pull my mother’s miniskirt a bit farther down my thighs, look at the green bottle in my hand, then glance back up at him. There’s only one lamp on in the room, and the detective looks even darker in this light. I can see he’s smiling—teasingly, maybe. His eyes are narrower than I remembered them being. I can smell him, too. On the drive here, in his black sedan, I thought I could smell his hair. It smelled like meat.

  I say, “I am, I guess,” and a nervous laugh catches like an airy hook inside me, somewhere between my throat and my nose.

  “Now, sweetheart,” he says, “you can leave any time you want. You wanted to seduce
me, right?”

  I nod, not looking at him.

  “Well, I’m seduced. Are you sure that’s what you want? I’m a big boy, you know. I don’t think we’re just going to second base tonight, if you know what I mean.”

  I look up. I say, “I know what you mean.”

  “You’re not a virgin are you?” He’s still smiling, looking at me now out of the corner of his eye.

  I shake my head.

  “That’s good, sweetheart. So you know what’s gonna happen here, then, don’t you? And that’s what you want to have happen?”

  I say, “Yes.” I can feel a weak blue vein throbbing in my neck.

  “Good,” he says. “I’m not in the habit of ruining little girls. You’re not a little girl, are you?”

  “No.” My voice is very low, as though it’s come out of my stomach, or out of that dead pond at the center of Freedom Crest.

  “Well, you’re lovely to look at, sweetheart,” he says, and I cannot help but think of a sign I saw in a china shop, Fun to hold, but if you break it, Consider it sold, and, scrawled under that, as if it might be too poetic for customers to explicate on their own: “You break, you pay.”

  When I look up he’s looking at me, head cocked. “I like your little haircut there. Is that what they call a page boy?”

  “I don’t know,” I whisper, “but thanks,” and push my bangs out of my eyes.

  “And I like your little titties, too,” he says in a different voice, a voice that fills me up with blood. He leans forward and looks hard at me. Where his shirt is unbuttoned at the neck, I see dark hair on his chest. He says, “I want to taste your little titties,” and I look down at my blouse, where my face is repeated over and over again in my gold buttons—hot coins of myself. Not even for a moment does it seem wrong to be here, or do I wonder why I am.

  “Maybe I should come and sit over there,” the detective says, and I move over an inch to make room for him on the leather couch, which makes a naked, human sound against my suede skirt. He puts his Heineken bottle down on the coffee table. Before he kisses me, he pushes my blouse a little farther open, looks at my white bra, and says, “Yummy.”

  He reaches in and feels my left breast, which is small and light in his palm. He even growls a little, pressing his face into mine.

  “IT WAS EASY,” I TELL MICKEY. SHE’S WASHING HER HANDS at the sink in the girls’ bathroom at school. On the mirror above her face, in red lipstick, someone has written “Anne Platt is fucking Mr. Fogarty.” Every morning, the janitor washes it off, but by afternoon it’s always back, and has been since September, scrawled in hard, loopy cursive—

  I have no idea who Anne Platt is, but I’ve heard she’s a freshman with enormous breasts. Mr. Fogarty is the assistant principal. His eyes are Aqua Velva blue, and he likes girls. Once, when I got caught smoking in the parking lot before school, I had to go to Mr. Fogarty’s office, where he gave me a pamphlet about lung cancer and winked at me. “Don’t get caught again,” he said.

  Now, whenever I pass him in the hallway, he smiles at me and lifts an invisible cigarette to his lips.

  It’s never seemed like much of a revelation that some freshman girl, Anne Platt, with big boobs, might be fucking Mr. Fogarty. The real mystery is the other girl, the one who must be sneaking into the girl’s bathroom every single day, writing that sentence in lipstick on the mirror again and again. All that loopy, feminine fury over what? Who could sustain a passion like that for so long? She must have had to skip classes to do it: Between classes, there were too many girls at the sinks to get away with that. Was it jealousy, or outrage, or something else?

  Sometimes I wondered if the writer might not be Anne Platt herself.

  Mickey hands me a stick of gum in a light green wrapper. “What was easy?” she asks, bending down to tie the lace of one of her shoes. The pleats of her skirt settle around her, and she looks like a pom-pom, dropped.

  “The detective,” I say.

  She looks up at me. The gum is so minty in my mouth as I chew it, I can hardly inhale. It’s like inhaling the steam off a block of ice, too fresh.

  “Oh my God,” Mickey says, standing up.

  I nod. I look at myself in the mirror. My face is lost inside fucking, as if the word is written in lipstick on my forehead. I fluff up my hair, then look back at Mickey and smile.

  “You’re kidding,” she says.

  I say, “I’m not.”

  “Wow, Kat.” Mickey shakes her head. “I’m truly, truly impressed.”

  FOUR

  January 1989

  FOR A FEW DAYS NOW, THE WEATHER HAS BEEN WARMER, turned the snow to damp rags—ruined, dirty, christening gowns. Phil is slopping through it on the way to our house in his muddy boots, taking big, slow steps, like a cartoon character stuck in tar—exaggerated, as if the thawed ground is sucking him down. His coat looks old, plaid, and scratchy. It was probably his father’s.

  Since graduation last June, since he’s started working at Sears full time, Phil has begun to look more and more like a boy who could be his own father. His gangliness has turned, almost imperceptibly, almost overnight, into an old man’s stoop. Now, when he comes to visit me at college, driving his father’s Dodge four hours north, smoking Marlboros all the way, listening to the frenzy of WKLL, then WKSS, then WZZZ—all those stations playing music that sounds like flimsy, brilliant sheets of tin being drilled together in factories all across the Midwest at once—there are ashes on his collar, and that coat smells like exhaust, pollution, a rest stop.

  By the time he gets to Ann Arbor, Phil has passed through some of the dirtiest places on earth—gray weather hanging over the highway, heavy with grime, and it’s settled on him, in his hair, which is too long now. The flip at his collar, too blond, the yellow-blond of a school bus. As Phil and I pass by the girls on the hall in my dormitory, they look at him sideways, as if he is a spy from another world, the world we’ve exited, at least for a while—the world of the suburb, the parent, the mall—or as if he might shed that dull world, walking, as if the stagnation of the place he’s driven up from were a virus in his tears, in his blood.

  All weekend, Phil will drink beer in my room, play heavy metal too loud on the stereo next to my bed. He’ll look uncomfortable in the cafeteria with his guest ticket and a white plate of Swiss steak on a tray. He’ll go to the library with me while I study, sitting slumped in a reading chair, looking at a magazine, then looking up, scanning the students with no expression on his face.

  My roommate doesn’t like him.

  He doesn’t look like a college boy.

  “What does he plan to do with his life?” Cindy asks.

  Cindy’s from Oak Park, Michigan. Her father is an ophthalmologist. Her hair is red—deep, autumn red—and she’s decorated our room with posters of Baryshnikov, arty black-and-white photographs of the dancer in tight tights, arms outstretched like a masculine bird. You can see the bulge that is his balls and penis stuffed into those tights—that stilled masculinity, that muscular dancing.

  Sometimes, studying, I look up at Cindy’s posters and feel a flush of blood spread across my chest.

  When he came to visit the first time, Phil looked closely at those posters and said, “Gross.”

  “He’s got to take care of his mother,” I tell her.

  “So?” she says, chomping gum.

  Cindy plans to be a genetics counselor and wastes no time on excuses. To her, everyone’s destiny can be plotted out on a graph of X’s and Fs. Some of us should never have been born. She dates a graduate student from the school of natural resources, who believes our natural resources will soon run out, and twice she’s tried to fix me up with his friend, Aaron, who wears hiking boots and bandannas and spends his summers on a research boat off the northern shore of Lake Michigan, looking at muddy weeds under a microscope.

  At first, we didn’t hit it off, but on our second date, just before I left for Christmas break, we drank a lot of warm, imported beer, and when Aaron kissed me good
night, our tongues flitted wet and silky into each other like the coincidence of fish in a large, murky lake, accidentally touching.

  I know he is the kind of date I should have. Not Theo Scieziesciez. Not Phil. Someone to make plans for the future with.

  But the future bores me.

  I imagine following it like a leaf into traffic.

  I imagine eating it like a heart made of oatmeal.

  “Someone called for you,” she says from her bed in the dark one night when I get back to the room with Phil.

  “Who was it?” I ask.

  Phil stands in the doorway, waiting: We try to wait until Cindy’s gone to sleep before coming back to the room to sleep. Phil takes the edge of the bed near the wall, farthest from Cindy. In the mornings, when we wake up, she’s usually gone.

  “It was Shh-shh-shh,” she says, sounding groggy but annoyed. I’ve told Cindy about the detective, about my relationship with him, and also told her that I don’t want Phil to know. Later, he and I will have a small, dry argument about it. She’s aware of this.

  “He sure calls a lot for someone who hasn’t managed to do one thing about your mother’s case in two and a half years, don’t you think?” Phil will say, but he’ll drop it as soon as I get defensive, as if he knows there’s more to this than he wants to know.

  The day after the night Aaron and I kissed, Phil came to pick me up and bring me home.

  As soon as I got home, I called the detective. “I’ve got a cold beer waiting for you in the fridge Saturday night, sweetheart,” he said, as he always says.

  What was I doing, I wondered, with all these men? I thought how, if you removed their hearts from their bodies and set all three out on a table, you couldn’t tell one from the other. So what was I doing, suddenly, with all three of them at once?